Philosopher Jacob Needleman has been teaching and writing about the riches of the
inner life for four decades, giving a sophisticated but accessible
perspective on the “big questions” of existence. A popular professor of philosophy at San Francisco
State University who has been featured on Bill Moyers World
of Ideas series, Needlemans most recent works include What is God? and An Unknown World.

Only one journalist has consistently followed Dr. Needleman's career over many years: Fearless Books founder D. Patrick Miller. Since 1989 he has conducted six feature interviews with Dr. Needleman on these subjects:

How much of the deprivation felt by modern Westerners can be
summed up by the complaints If only I had more time 
and If only I felt more love ? (Throw in more
money and youve just about got all our habitual wants
summed up.) If philosopher Jacob Needleman is right, we will
not find more love in online dating services nor any extra time
in a new iPhone app. Instead, we must turn these searches
in on themselves to ask why we seek so incessantly for
more of such immeasurables. By confronting our habitual desires
and complaints, he suggests, we may pry open the door to the
realm of the inner life  where both time and love reveal
themselves not as problems to be solved but questions to be lived
with.

Such great questions cannot
be answered with the part of the mind that solves problems,
writes Needleman. They need to be deeply felt and experienced
long, long before they can begin to be answered. Yet it
is in the very willingness to deeply feel and long experience
the questions of time and love that we can begin to experience
enough of both.

In this talk with D. Patrick Miller, Jacob Needleman explores
some of the connections between these two great questions of
human existence.

We tend to think that both time
and love are elusive or actively evading us. You suggest
that we really dont need to search for either time or love,
that whats more productive is to examine the search itself.NEEDLEMAN: Our relationship to time and love is conditioned by our state
of being  our capacity to simply occupy our life, to be
in touch with our real selves. The degree to which were
not in touch with the real self is the degree to which we are
frustrated and driven crazy by lack of time, or find ourselves
turning round and round either searching for or avoiding love
in a way thats bitter and possibly degrading. The degree
to which we are able to open to the real presence within 
the I am or God within  is the degree to which
we begin to have a human relationship to time and love.

Its that inner relationship that provides us with a center
of gravity, the basis of meaning for everything else. When you
feel a search or hunger for that inner presence, then you have
some basis for a truly human relationship between two people
that doesnt exist otherwise. To be supporting each others
inward search is a basis for love that has not been widely written
about or understood.

You speak of sustained love as
a mystery in broad daylight. The most obvious meaning
of sustained is over time. How is the
mystery of love sustained over time different from the mystery
of falling in love?NEEDLEMAN: When you fall in love, it happens all
by itself. Its not something you do deliberately, it more
or less happens to you. Theres no resistance from aspects
of yourself that want to go another way; youre not struggling
or trying to exercise your will or intention. Theres no
reckoning of time, and youre not aware of anything but
the movement of falling in love.

We all
know from such experiences of passion that while we are with
the person we love, time stands still as if it doesnt exist.
The sense of time that were used to involves the mind and
thinking, and is at the service of fear, planning, and manipulation.
Those aspects of the self are what ordinarily make time into
an enemy, and makes us feel driven. Time re-enters the experience
of falling in love only when fear comes back, when we begin to
feel that we must hold onto the love, and dont want to
let go. Or we start worrying about how this new love will fit
into the rest of our lives. Then time seems to exert pressure
again. But in the midst of the bliss of love, the mind and its
fears has no authority at all.

Sustained love has to do with struggle. The automatic gift of
love that is given to us by nature begins to change by encountering
resistance  where something comes in against it, an inevitability
in any process of life. When resistance appears, intention is
required. People who cant make it past that point will
go looking for another hit of automatic love; theyll want
to fall in love over and over again because it doesnt require
so much work. Because there always comes a point in the real
love relationship when work is required, and that means working
against all the impulses and distractions that we are heir to:
other attractions, jealousy, sense of inadequacy, fear of responsibility,
not to mention dealing with the simple day-to-day matters of
life that can wear us down. These difficulties dont appear
all at once; they occur over time, and thats why you must
renew your intention many times to create sustained love.

Youve written that the
Self is everything that the ego pretends to be, and the Self
has the time that the ego searches for in vain. Is it only
the Self that is capable of sustained love, and can the ego only
fall in love?NEEDLEMAN: No, I think theres something in between the ego and the
Self. Perhaps we could call it the noble part of the ego, that
knows it has an unaccountable feeling in search of the Self.
You might also call it the emerging soul. If the ego were completely
insensitive, we wouldnt have a chance because the ego rules
us mostly. But in most of us, the ego at least has a hint that
theres something like the Self. That part of the ego struggles,
and can have intentional love. The real Self doesnt struggle,
because its very essence is love and compassion. When that appears
there is no struggle.

In the Buddhist mahayana tradition, compassion appears
all by itself when the ego is overcome. You dont have to
develop it; its part of human nature. In between the worst
parts of the ego and the glory of the Self, there is this intermediate
principle that is searching for completion.

Would you say then that we start
falling out of love when the ego begins looking at its watch?NEEDLEMAN: Absolutely.
Every woman knows that when a man starts looking at his watch
Theres a saying in France that love can withstand
everything but a busy man. There are a lot of forces that
can weigh against love, but basically time is the sum of all
these forces; it enters into everything.

In your book about love you introduce
an understanding of the philosophical stance known as Stoicism
that differs from the popular notion that someone who is stoic
is simply unfeeling or not admitting their suffering. How is
real Stoicism related to time and love?NEEDLEMAN: The basic idea of Stoicism is that we
are essentially one with the great self, or Logos of the universe.
Thats our true nature. We exercise that true nature by
the capacity of the mind to relate consciously to its experiences
 to accept, understand, or receive them without the preferences
of liking or disliking those experiences, or responding with
fear or craving. Nor does a true stoic try to reinterpret experiences,
make them more or less dramatic, or good or bad. The stoic receives
all experiences with an inner quiet.

This brings about a great inner freedom  the freedom of
the person who is not devoured by emotional reactions. That doesnt
mean he doesnt have these reactions; it means they dont
toss him around. Its very wrong to think of a stoic as
not caring. In fact the true stoic can act in a truly caring
way because hes less at the service of his own egoistic
emotions.

We tend to think that if we are in love we should be devoured
by emotion, or at the very least agitated to a high degree. Doesnt
passion mean that you cant live without the other person?
We want that total captivity. We may feel insecure if we dont
love that way, or dont feel loved that way. But a stoic
doesnt love that way.

Perhaps the best popular icon we have for the stoic is the character
Spock from the original Star Trek series. Why is Spock the most
lovable figure from that show, the one who still touches fans
the most? The idea about him was that he had no emotion, but
in fact he had very strong feelings of loyalty, love, and justice.
Captain Kirk was heroic too, but full of bombast and agitated
emotions. And the other characters showed all kinds of neurosis.
But Spock seemed to operate at a higher level, truly living by
what he felt and believed without making a big show of his feelings.
Thats what made him a lasting and beloved icon.

Its also interesting to
remember that Spock was the bastion of integrity  incapable
of lying or manipulating to achieve his aims, as Captain Kirk
often did.NEEDLEMAN: Thats
right. The stoic literally lives for truth; he feels truth, love,
and loyalty to the core but is not swayed by his own self-interest.
This points up the difference between what might one call real
feeling and egoistic emotion. We are so used to egoistic
emotions that weve often forgotten what real feeling is
like....

There's more to this interview! You'll be able to read the complete version (plus five more intriguing conversations about God, mysticism, the American soul, and much more) in NECESSARY WISDOM.

_________________________

Also available from Fearless Books: the “Revived Edition” of Jacob Needleman's classic workThe Way of the Physician: Recovering the Heart of Medicine. Out of print for over a decade, this profound work of creative nonfiction restores the element of heart to the discussion of what “health care” really is.

In a series of letters to his childhood physician, the popular philosopher questions the very nature of healing and asks challenging questions about what we have lost during the ever more technological march of modern medicine.

“Jacob Needleman has taken an elusive set of ideas and made of them a drama that even the most hidebound materialist is bound to attend...” — THE NEW YORK TIMES